Ecom Tip: How to Expand Your Product Line WITHOUT Buying Inventory or Dropshipping from China

Irene Wanja | Feb 25, 2022

Reading Time: 3 minutes

Hey, everybody! Jeremy Friedland from Build Grow Scale here, and in today’s video, I’m going to talk to you about how to add inventory or complimentary products to your store without having to buy inventory, and without dropshipping from China. So, let’s get into it!

I want to talk about a scenario really quickly. Let’s say you have a store that’s doing really well, you have quite a few products that are selling in a particular niche, and you decide you’d like to add more complementary products. Why? Well, you want to sell more stuff and you want to give your customers more options and opportunities to experience your store.

But … You don’t want to buy a bunch of new inventory or have a custom product made for you without knowing whether the product is actually going to sell. 

Unfortunately, a lot of ecom business owners run into this problem. They try to source something related to their current product line, but they don’t know if it’s even going to sell on their store.

So, to prevent that—and all the headaches that come along with it—from happening, you can partner with an existing ecommerce store that sells a product complementary to yours and that you know is selling and popular with that store’s customers.

How do you do that? It’s simple:

1. Find a store that sells a product that’s complementary to something you sell.
2. Reach out to the store owner and ask if they’d like to partner up and allow you to sell their product on your store.

Now, most store owners, as long as it’s not a conflict of interest, are going to say, “Heck yeah, please sell more of my product.” So, if they agree to partnering, you guys would work out the commission or amount of money you’re going to split, which will depend on margins and all sorts of stuff.

And next, comes the app.

Syncio App

A great way to add someone else’s product(s) to your store is via the Syncio app. It allows you to take products from another ecom store and put them directly on your store. You can change the price, description, images, etc. if you’d like, or simply transfer everything over as is so that it shows exactly the same on your website as it does on theirs.

Syncio will also sync all of the prices and inventory updates, so the product will remain as up-to-date as possible on your store. For instance, if you sell one unit on your end, it takes one unit of inventory away on your partner’s end, and vice versa. 

So now let’s go ahead and walk through what the app looks like and how it works.

How It Works

You can find the Syncio app in your Shopify App Store. It starts at just $19 a month and comes with a 14-day free trial, so you can check it out for two weeks and see if it’s going to be a good fit for you.

As previously mentioned, this app syncs your store’s products with another store’s products, along with inventory, pricing, images, description, etc. so that it looks like it’s actually your product.

It also has an order push option, so you can choose for it to automatically send over your orders if you’d like. Otherwise, you can elect to go through your orders at the end of each day and push them through manually as well.

And again, it also updates inventory counts in real time. So, let’s say the product you’re selling only has 10 units left in stock and you sell five. Syncio will update both your inventory and your partner’s store inventory so that it shows five left on both sides. And if one of you sells out of it, it will reflect as “sold out” on both stores.

So, this is a great solution for offering more products on your store that are complementary to your own product line without having to dropship from China or buy a bunch of inventory without knowing how it’s going to sell.

When You Find a Winning Product

Once you find a product that’s selling really well via this strategy, you can go ahead and source it and make your own version to sell on your store … and keep all the money! 

Wrap-Up

Syncio is a very inexpensive, easy-to-set-up, risk-free way to test products on your ecommerce store before committing to inventory of your own. I highly recommend you go this route the next time you’re thinking about selling a new product. It’ll give you peace of mind and protect your bottom line while finding (hopefully) your next bestseller!

I hope you found this training helpful, and I can’t wait to hear the feedback from those of you who try it out on your own stores.

If you’d like to learn more about Build Grow Scale and how we can help you take your ecom business to the next level, go to workwithbgs.com and schedule a free strategy session with one of our Revenue Optimization™ experts. We’d love to learn about your business and help you reach your ecommerce goals!